U.S. Policy and Debate on the Middle East: Whatever Happened to Adult Supervision?

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
01 July '10

If you take any given 24-hour period, it is amazing to see the drumbeat of silliness and misinformation prominently displayed and distributed by (formerly?) prestigious institutions. Let’s take just four examples in the period just finished.

First, Thomas L. Friedman is an expert on the Middle East. Unfortunately, however, he is only an expert on the Middle East as seen by the Washington DC establishment at any particular moment. This fact also requires him to jump around between contradictory positions.

His gimmick this week is, “The Real Palestinian Revolution.” Now one might call the way Hamas threw Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) out of the Gaza Strip and turned that territory into a radical Islamist state is a real Palestinian revolution. Or one might say that a real Palestinian revolution would take place when Fatah, the PA, and Palestinian public opinion really changed toward accepting a two-state solution.

Instead, his “real revolution” is merely a matter of image, as in the following paragraph:

“It is a revolution based on building Palestinian capacity and institutions not just resisting Israeli occupation, on the theory that if the Palestinians can build a real economy, a professional security force and an effective, transparent government bureaucracy it will eventually become impossible for Israel to deny the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem....It is the only hope left, though, for a two-state solution, so it needs to be quietly supported.”

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